Guillermo Rauch has been building Vercel for 10+ years. But talk to him and you’d never know it. He seems to have the energy of a 19-year-old Stanford dropout who just went through YC.
Guillermo joins me on the first episode of "10 Minutes or Less" to why he's anti 1-on-1s, the need to be "terminally online," and how he creates unstructured blocks in his day to be on Twitter, using the product, and doing customer support. We also touch on the future of Vercel, including whether he one day wants to take Vercel public.
One of my first questions was how often he checks Twitter. I’m constantly blown away by founders running billion-dollar, hyper-growth companies who somehow stay this online: posting multiple times a day, jumping into conversations, spotting opportunities in real time, and shipping around them (eg the company’s AI SDK recently crossed 10M weekly downloads).
(I later used Claude Code to analyze Guillermo’s Twitter, and found he’s posted an average of 2.92 times per day this year 😂)
This is obviously intentional: “I feel like you have to be more online than ever. I call it ‘terminally online.’”
He shared his framework for creating the time and space to be online, using the product, interacting with users, rather than bogged down by endless meetings.
Q: “How many times do you check Twitter a day?”
A: “I’ll tell you my framework… I still do the traditional company running like weekly business review. I don’t do as many one on ones.... I was also always kind of against one to one information sharing when I could actually disseminate information more efficiently with a larger group. And so I do a lot more like long form writing, write threads, bring customer feedback to the team and publish it to bigger groups. But then I set up unstructured time when I can go on Twitter. I can play with our products, I can do customer service, I can do whatever I want that I feel is productive at that given time.”
He hires extremely high-agency people, many of them former founders, who seek out information and customer feedback on their own rather than waiting to be told what to do. This gives him space to stay much closer to the ground than most CEOs at his stage would dare to.
Q: What's one thing you're still personally doing that other CEOs at your stage might have delegated?
A: “I sadly get credit for giving people customer support, like doing customer support myself. And people literally say, oh my God, you’re a CEO, what are you doing? And I always consider: what is the alternative? What are the other CEOs doing? They don’t know their product, they don’t talk to customers, or they think that some customers are just not as important as some other customers. Of course there’s customers that we get more revenue from. But even the free tier developer is informing how I can build the best platform in the world so that the largest companies can use and benefit from it. So I do a lot of support. I talk to a lot of people every day. I read every email and DM that I get and I use our product a lot.”
Guillermo grew up in Argentina where nothing, not even his personal safety, was guaranteed. That grounding shows. There’s a trap in the Valley: never enough, always striving, never satisfied. Guillermo seems to genuinely enjoy the journey rather than be consumed by it.
He’s also unabashedly ambitious. When asked whether he wants to take Vercel public, there was no hedging.
Q: Some founders in Silicon Valley don't actually want to take their companies public, Stripe being the number one example. Do you one day want to take Vercel public?
A: "I don't understand why you wouldn't want to take a company public, especially when you're a company that is a public good. Ultimately, I see Vercel as an extension of the web and the Internet… You can have bears and people that are really negative on your company. No one would want that. But also part of me that is competitive and wants to be pushed wants that too. If you're a CEO saying I don't want to go public because they're going to be mean to me, then you've missed the point. I actually thrive in customers being somewhat harsh and mean, and critical of our products. Maybe not every company is ready for that, but certainly we want to be."
You can’t beat someone who’s having fun.
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